How The City Has Grown Up Around A Famous Bridge

August 04, 1985|By Bob Hughes.

When you`re standing at the entrance of Tribune Tower at 435 N. Michigan Ave., you`re really three floors above ground level. Until the 1800s the land on both sides of the Chicago River in this part of town was low and wet. ``A depressing expanse of bogs and sloughs,`` one writer called it.

What now is the Loop was only a few inches higher than the level of Lake Michigan and consequently was under water for several months of the year. And the banks of the river ``were covered by a rank and noisome growth of skunk cabbage or wild onion, which gave shelter and sustenance to a large and resentful colony of polecats,`` wrote Herbert Asbury in ``Gem of the Prairie.``

Poor prospect for a ``Magnificent Mile.``

It didn`t take long for Chicago, however, to solidify and then rise above its soggy foundations. Like many other cities both living and dead, it literally grew on top of itself.

For cities big and small do build upon themselves. Each day at every population center more things are brought in than are consumed or hauled out and flushed away. Over centuries, the accretion becomes the foundation for new buildings, and inch by inch newer cities rise upon the old. In some ancient sites archeologists have found as many as 60 distinct cities that had grown one on top of another.

The process seems to be accelerated in the New World. Less than 200 years ago, Chicago was a trading post and fort sitting at river level; today at that site the main entrances to Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the Equitable Building and other nearby structures are two or three stories above the river. Standing on the lower level of the Michigan Avenue bridge, you`re a full flight of stairs above water level, where the Wendella and Mercury river boats play, and above you is an almost never-ending stream of upper-level traffic.

Up until 1917, Michigan Avenue north of the river was a quiet, tree-shaded thoroughfare called Pine Street. But the pavement, starting from the

``gruesome margin of the waterfront,`` as one writer put it, ended at what is now Grand Avenue.

With the building of the Michigan Avenue Bridge in 1920, property owners declared a ban on undesirable enterprises and buildings and the kinds of activities customarily associated with riverfronts. They sought out the best available architectural advice and encouraged the creation of what eventually was to become Chicago`s ``Magnificent Mile.``

The Wrigley Building`s south section was completed in 1921, and its north section in 1924, and Tribune Tower was finished in 1925 to be the two skyscrapers to anchor North Michigan Avenue. Wacker Drive, named for the president of the Chicago Plan Commission at the time, opened Oct. 20, 1926, as a ``great, two-level esplanade,`` and some dreamers predicted three levels of traffic streaming in and out of the central business district.

The dreamers may have been right. A three-level section of Wacker Drive now is in place south of the river underneath Illinois Center, the cluster of buildings that have arisen in the ``air rights`` above the Illinois Central Railroad tracks. A law requires that a parkway be built on the strip between the triple-decked Wacker Drive of Illinois Center and the south bank of the river, but this valuable and potentially beautiful piece of public property at the south end of the Michigan Avenue Bridge still awaits suitable action by the city.

One innovative plan for this area was put forward in 1983. Architect Stanley Tigerman suggested that row houses be built along the edge of the three-level drive, concealing the roadway from the riverfront and giving future residents a magnificent riverside view.